"Amir E. Aharoni" amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
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On a more practical and less ideological note, I should note that even though I didn't run the numbers, I strongly suspect that translating 10,000 articles to 100 languages is considerably cheaper than teaching 7 billion people English.
Definitely, but your argument was:
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| If there is no substantial Wikipedia in such a language, these people can't | read Wikipedia in *any language* because they are monolingual. Most likely | they cannot read any any encyclopedia in any language. They need a | Wikipedia not in order to preserve the language, but to have access to | *any* encyclopedic knowledge.
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A large part of humanity *has* access to a reasonably main- tained Wikipedia in a language they understand, not to speak of traditional encyclopedias in schools and libraries.
Then of course there is the more fundamental problem: If those 100,000 monolingual speakers do not speak other lan- guages, have no access to encyclopedias, etc., how do they interact with a computer now, which web sites do they visit, etc.?
I just have a very hard time to imagine a community of 100,000 people under those circumstances who are only held back by not having access to a Wikipedia. On the contrary, this reminds me very much of traditional development prac- tices where third world countries always seem to urgently need to buy what first world countries have to sell. IMHO, there is a considerable risk that this creates unhealthy de- pendencies.
Tim